CORAL-2 Benchmarks

Introduction

The CORAL-2 benchmarks contained within this site represent their state as of early December 2017. Over the next few months the list of applications will be changing. While we expect most of the changes will be additions it is possible that we will remove applications or change their category.

For now links to the benchmark applications websites are provided. Once we have performed and released a reference figure of merit (FOM) for an application we will include a static source of that application on this site and a document describing the benchmarking procedures for the application. Reference FOMs will be run on either Sequoia or Titan.

Tier-1 Benchmark Information

The Hardware Accelerated Cosmology Code (HACC) framework uses N-body techniques to simulate the formation of structure in collisionless fluids under the influence of gravity in an expanding universe.
It depends on external FFT library and is typically compute limited achieving 13.92 Petaflops, 69.2% of machine peak on Sequoia.

Nekbone is a mini-app derived from the Nek5000 CFD code which is a high order, incompressible Navier- Stokes CFD solver based on the spectral element method. The conjugate gradiant solve is compute intense, contains small messages and frequent allreduces.

QMCPACK is a many-body ab initio quantum Monte Carlo code for computing the electronic structure of atoms, molecules, and solids. It is written primarily in C++, and its use of template metaprogramming is known to stress compilers. When run in production, the code is memory bandwidth sensitive, while still needing thread efficiency to realize good performance.

AMG is a parallel algebraic multigrid solver for linear systems arising from problems on unstructured grids. AMG is memory-access bound, generates many small messages and stresses memory and network latency.

The RAJA performance suite is designed to explore performance of loop-based computational kernels of the sort found in HPC applications. In particular, it is used to assess, monitor, and compare runtime performance of kernels implemented using RAJA and variants implemented using standard or vendor-supported parallel programming models directly. Each kernel in the suite appears in multiple RAJA and non-RAJA variants using parallel programming models such as OpenMP and CUDA.

Tier-2 Benchmark Information

ACME is a high-resolution climate simulation code for the entire Earth system, containing five major components for the atmosphere, ocean, land surface, sea ice, and land ice along with a coupler. Performance limiters will be network latency, memory bandwidth, kernel launch overheads on accelerators, and accelerator data transfer latency.

VPIC (Vector Particle-In-Cell) is a general purpose particle-in-cell simulation code for modeling kinetic plasmas. It employs a second-order, explicit, leapfrog algorithm to update charged particle positions and velocities in order to solve the relativistic kinetic equation for each species in the plasma, along with a full Maxwell description for the electric and magnetic fields evolved via a second- order finite-difference-time-domain (FDTD) solve.

Laghos solves the time-dependent Euler equation of compressible gas dynamics in a moving Lagrangian frame using unstructured high-order finite element spatial discretization and explicit high-order time-stepping. It is built on top of a general discretization library (MFEM) and supports two modes: *full assembly*, where performance is limited by the data motion in a conjugate gradient (CG) solve, and *partial assembly*, where performance depends mostly on small dense matrix operations and the CG solve communication.

The BigSort benchmark sorts a large number of 64-bit integers (from 0 to T) in parallel. In particular, the total size of the data set can exceed the aggregated memory size of all nodes. The goal is to exercise and study a computer system’s memory hierarchy performance when it comes to big data management. The emphasis here is IO, all-to-all communication, and integer operations.